Live Forever
by Oasis
- 83
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 11
- Danceability
- 0
- Acousticness
In 1991 Noel Gallagher was working for a building company in Manchester when a pipe crushed his foot. He was moved to a less strenuous job in the storeroom. That gave him more time to write songs. One night he listened to Exile on Main St. and found that one of his chord progressions fit a vocal melody from "Shine a Light". He turned it into "Maybe I don't really want to know". For a while that was all of the song he had.
He played the finished song for the band in early 1993, and drummer Tony McCarroll said they were awed. It helped them win their deal with Creation Records, whose boss Alan McGee called hearing it the single greatest moment he had experienced with them. Gallagher said he wrote it in the middle of grunge and did not want to hear Nirvana's "I Hate Myself and Want to Die", though he did not mean it as a direct retort. Producer Owen Morris cut the acoustic intro and part of the guitar solo.
Creation released it on August 8, 1994, as the third single from Definitely Maybe, just before the album. The sleeve showed John Lennon's childhood home at 251 Menlove Avenue. It was the first Oasis single to reach the UK top ten. In 1995 it reached number two on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart.
Live Forever runs at 83 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.89 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 723 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.